Taught in 2020–2021 by Benoît Crabbé and Philippe de Groote. First semester course, on Fridays 12:45–15:45 in room 1014. Classes delivered in English if at least one student asks for it; in French otherwise.

We sketch here the planned contents for 2020–2021. These contents are structured around three important subdomains of linguistics, (morphology, syntax, and semantics), presenting on each occasion some of the related models and the corresponding algorithmic issues. The exact dates and content might change.

1. September 18th, 2020 Slides
   • General Introduction Language has structure. Language and inference. The importance of ambiguity. Language and the world.
   • Linguistics basics for computational linguistics. Statistical properties of words, constituent and dependency analyses, computing semantic denotations and computing semantic similarities.
   • Machine learning basics for computational linguistics. Coding discrete symbols as vectors (word embeddings), optimisation reminder.
2. September 25th, 2020 Slides
   • Modelling sequences Presentation of typical problems involving sequence modelling.
   • Generative models language models, hidden markov models, PCFG
   • Discriminative models conditional random fields
   • Algorithms Viterbi and approximative methods
   • Deep learning based methods
3. October 2nd, 2020 Modelling syntax Slides
   • Phrase structure grammar
   • Tree adjoining Grammar
   • Dependency syntax
   • Categorial grammar
4. October 9th, 2020 Parsing algorithms for natural language Slides
   • CKY and Earley Introduction to weighted CKY and Earley
   • Shift Reduce and Eisner for Dependency syntax
   • CKY for tree adjoining grammar
5. October 16th, 2020
   • Semantic Representations modal logics, higher-order logics
6. October 23rd, 2020
   • Syntax/Semantics Interface compositionality, higher-order syntax, abstract categorial grammars
7. November 6th, 2020
   • Montague Semantics model-theoretic semantics, intensionality
8. November 13th, 2020 Discourse Analysis discourse representation theory, anaphora resolution, type-theoretic dynamic logic
9. November 27th, 2020
   • exam

Readings for the exam :

1. A. Clark (2014) An introduction to Multiple Context Free Grammars for linguists link
2. L. Zettlemoyer and M. Collins (2005) Learning to Map Sentences to Logical Form: Structured Classification with Probabilistic Categorial Grammars link
3. L. Champollion (2020) Distributivity, Collectivity, and Cumulatively. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, eds D. Gutzmann, L. Matthewson, C. Meier, H. Rullmann and T. Zimmermann. link